Every time someone does a search for something on search engines such as Google, the search engine must go through thousands of pages and serve the best results that will give the user most useful information he searched for.
How does the search engine know what information to serve based on just a few words? Well, search engines use to determine the best and most relevant information for every search term that is entered on search engine from user. Because of that, it is very important to create a strategy of keywords so that your eCommerce store could rank better every time user search for terms that are related to products that you sell. The ultimate goal is to rank on the first page of search engine and make your eCommerce more visible to users.
For that matter, it is very important that you know what keywords to include on your site and to do thorough research of words you think could trigger your store higher on search results.
Keyword research is a strategy used by SEO experts to find alternative search terms people are entering into search engines while looking for a specific subject. They then collect those keywords and create a strategy to achieve better rankings on search engines. It then helps them to better understand terminology that your potential customers are searching to find products you’re selling.
If you can improve your skills about keyword research strategy for your business, you will certainly benefit from more search engine traffic and also know your customers better than your competition.
In this article, we will cover the basic terms you must know about keyword research for eCommerce to help search engines to understand what is your site about and what are you selling, and help you to rank better and increase your sales.
Basic Terms for Keyword Research
Keywords
Keywords are search terms that millions of people enter into search engines while looking and searching for a specific information. Google tracks all of this information and also offers you a few tools to use to improve your strategy of keyword research. Keywords are here to explain what your web site is about and you want keywords on your store to be relevant to what people are searching for.
Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are more specific keywords people are searching for on search engines, and they contain three or more than three words. They are more specific than keywords that contain one or two words, because in this case, the user is searching for a specific query. Someone who is searching for a „red dress“ is probably just collecting information and exploring, but someone who enters „little red cocktail dress for prom price“ is much closer to purchasing the product. It is better to concentrate on those people who are searching for a specific product because they probably already researched about it and are ready to buy it.
Search Volume (Avg. Monthly Searches)
Search volume is the number of searches that are shown for a specific keyword within a certain period of time. It would be ideal if you could look for the keywords with the highest search volume because it means more potential traffic and conversions on your eCommerce store.
Competition
Maybe the most important segment of keyword research is keyword competition. It measures how difficult it will be to rank for a specific keyword on search engines. It depends on how popular is the search term or the industry that is related to the search term. It would be ideal if your keywords have high search volume and low competition, but those kind of keywords are very difficult to find and require a lot of work that will certainly pay off, so when you see a ton of keywords when making a plan, don’t panic, be smart and start making a list.
Use Keyword Planner
Real keyword research cannot be done properly without a keyword planner tool. Keyword planner tool is here to help you discover completely new concepts and terminology that users use to find what they are looking for, and that maybe didn’t occur to you. It gives you the option to make a list for every group of similar keywords that you could split by categories on your store. Statistics like search volume of a specific keyword could help you decide which keywords you could use on your site on the specific page.
Make a List of Keywords
As I mentioned before, after seeing hundreds of words listed on your keyword planner tool when you search for queries you think that would your future customer’s search, don’t panic, rather be wise and make a list that will contain similar search terms and make it easy to manage your future strategy.
For example, if you have a category page for certain brand on your store for women, you can make list for every subcategory page of your store that will contain keywords related to that subcategory.
Let’s make is simple. You have category for Women’s clothes. It contains five subcategories:
- Bags & Purses
- Coats & Jackets
- Tracksuits
- Sweatshirts
- Accessories
For every subcategory listed above, you will make a special list that contains keywords related to that specific category. In that case, in subcategory Bags & Purses it is logical to put words such as: bags, women’s bags, purses for women, women’s purses, and so on.
This part of work is very hard and requires full concentration, but in the end, it will definitely pay off with higher rankings of your store and result in more conversions.
Conclusion
Although I know that keyword research demands a lot of work and takes a lot of time, from my experience, it will surely pay off when you implement those keywords on your eCommerce store, from the SEO point of view. Over time it will result in higher page rank, more visitors and for that, more customers, increase of sale and growth of conversions.
If you find this article useful and you want to know more about this, or you want to improve page rank, sales, attract more visitors to your eCommerce store, see what we offer in SEO Audit.